All the Myriad Faces: Nini's Book teaser
by Gepetto
Summary: To make up for not being able to update--- stupid technical glitches... "come back in a few minutes" my arse...--- I'm posting this as a bit of a sneak peak at the upcoming sequel to The Aftermath: Aang's Story.


**A/N **As I said before in _The Aftermath: Aang's Story_, I'm really, really, really sorry about not being able to update on time. Yeah, It's 's fault, but… Well, either way, you've got no right to complain _now_! Aheheh. Here's a collection of scenes from the upcoming _All the Myriad Faces: Nini's Book_, though you should keep in mind that these will still be rewritten to an extent. The second one, for example, would of course not include a physical description of Nini, given that she'd have appeared before then, while the third scene includes some information about Hidama which would have been explained _long_ before. But without it, you've got no idea why there's a wolf-spirit who is, more or less, trying to get in Nini's pants.

Sure, he doesn't quite say it like that, but if you're unable to read between the lines, especially given Nini's thoughts on the matter, then you're _really_ dense.

And that's saying something, because _I'm_ usually the dense one.

* * *

_Water Year 1164_

_The Bei Fong Estate, outside Gaoling, Province of Gaoling_

Zuko stopped the ostrich-horse and slipped off, groaning. The ride had been a long one, but in a way he was happy for it, aches and all. It was the first time in years that he'd been able to go someplace without knowing that his bodyguards were within ten feet of him, and his attendants weren't all too fond of the idea of _Fire Lord Zuko _doing something not entirely befitting a man of his rank. Something like actually taking a walk outside the Capital City with his children. Alone, too, if the "scandal" of it all could be increased any further.

He knocked on the door, though he knew that it was unnecessary; One of the servants outside had seen him arriving, and went inside minutes before he'd gotten to close enough to even read the tiny script of the sign up on the door. "Property of Bei Fong Toph. If you're not on the payroll… STAY AWAY." Below this, in slightly larger lettering just to ensure that it was noticed (and hopefully before the main message was), there was another message, from the staff of the Bei Fong Staff, apologizing for their mistress, and hoping that any visitors would realize that she just wasn't fond of company.

Chuckling softly, something he hadn't done for far too long (Agni, he hadn't even seen his grandchildren for _months_), the door was opened by a tall woman, one who he could have sworn was a twenty-four-year Song except, of course, that Song would have been an old woman by now. She gasped when she saw him. "Fire Lord— Fire Lord Zuko!"

"Zuko, please," he told her as she began to bow in what she apparently thought was the Fire Nation style of doing it.

"Y—yes. Of course, Fir— Zuko," she stammered. "What brings you to our mistress' estate?"

"I have some news, and a request from an old friend of ours."

"Oh, my. She… She doesn't much like it when other people come in, but… I'm sure she'll make an exception for you. Please wait out here," she said, and froze. "Oh, spirits. I'm sorry. I know you're the Fire Lord and all but…"

"I'm fine, ma'am."

"Of course. Yes. I'm sorry, though. But I don't think she'd make an exception even for you. I'm—"

"I was wanting to talk to Toph," Zuko reminded her, and she took off like an arrow, still frantically apologizing as she went, and then suddenly changed the target of her apologies as she nearly bumped into her employer. Toph was still short, perhaps only a few inches taller than she'd been at twelve, and her eyes had lost whatever coloring they'd once had.

She looked old not just in body.

"Oh, dear. Spirits, I'm sorry, mistress—"

"Lily, dear?" Toph interrupted.

"Yes."

"Shut up, dear, or I'll have to fire you. I don't pay you to apologize, Lily."

The servant shot off again, and Toph sighed. "It's nearly as irritating as the war, isn't it? Being rich and famous ain't all it's cracked up to be, eh?" Toph snorted. "So what do you want, 'Fire Lord' Zuko?" she asked, walking away.

"Aang is dead."

She paused for a split instant, and Zuko wouldn't even have noticed had he not trained himself to be attentive to even the tiniest of details _many_ decades ago. When you were at risk of being assassinated at any second, it kind of came with the job. "Is that all? Or do you still feel the need to keep wasting my time?"

"That's it? I thought you would care a little bit."

"I stopped caring a long time ago. I've grown past all of that," Toph said. "We were friends, a long time ago, but… Hell. Things happened. The Red Roses happened. _Life_ happened."

Hands in his cloak, Zuko slowly looked around the hall, taking note of the bare walls, and the absolute lack of anything at all. It seemed that Toph hadn't done much to spruce up the old estate after taking control.

"Aang would like it if we told his successor about his life," he told his old friend.

Toph opened a door and walked into a small room, containing nothing but a small table, three chairs, and a large, coffin-like stone near the table. Taking a seat in the chair nearest the stone, and motioning for Zuko to sit down as well, she finally answered. "_You_ tell her."

"That's it?" Zuko asked. "What _really_ happened to you? Do you realize that after you left us, there were maybe four periods in your life before now when my people could keep track of you for more than two weeks? What has happened to you?"

"I did stuff," Toph replied. "I tried to find something to occupy my time. Ruling that one place, Omashu it was, should have told me that I wasn't cut out for having swarms of sycophants, but I suppose I didn't really learn that, seeing where I am now. And I wandered around, and just plain tried to lose myself, and the war with the Red Roses happened sometime around there, and after that brief toss I went back to wandering, and… Eventually decided to teach others how to Metalbend. And then started wandering around again once my earliest students had graduated, and could start teaching the other students."

"A… 'toss,' Toph? That's all it was to you?"

"More than it was to you, Mr. Playing-Both-Sides."

Zuko stared at her, and found that he couldn't find his voice.

"Yeah," she muttered. "I know all about it. Frankly, I'm surprised that you never killed Aang."

"How did you…. How did you find out?"

The old woman stared into him, cold dead eyes looking blankly into his, and he felt like she was peering into his soul. "One of your Dai Li punks. I can't remember his name."

Realization hit him. "Gansu… But… It was always curious, but…"

"Come on, Zuko. How could a _Dai Li_ just trip into a raging river and get carried to a waterfall with a damned five-hundred foot drop?"

"It could happen, and after awhile, when nothing happened…"

"That's what I thought you'd decide," Toph said. "I also figured that he'd be too bashed up for you to notice what I'd done to him, though I had to drag his body back up a second time to make the damage look 'right.' I didn't want you to see the knife wounds, no."

"But why didn't you say anything?"

Toph shrugged. "It had happened a long time ago, even then. What good would it do? And I didn't care, anyways. No matter what you did, there'd still be the same muggings and murders and rapes happening down at the bottom of society. That's what I was concerned about by that point. If you had actually gotten the stones to kill Aang, and won the war the way you were first intending to, I still would have experienced the same things and still had to put down the same exact people. A mere change of rulers wouldn't have really made it any worse or better for the common folk, once everything had stabilized."

"So you won't tell her anything about Aang when you train her?"

Now Toph laughed. "You do presume too much, Fire Lord! Who said I was going to train Aang's stupid replacement?"

"You're the greatest Earthbender alive," he responded. "And I've already broken one rule, so why not another?" was something he _didn't_ say. There's a lot that Zuko said only in his head.

"Zuko, I'm tired. More tired than you can imagine. I just want to be left alone. I want to able to finally have some peace before I die."

"We're all tired," was what he might have continued to say, as he spoke up. "Toph—"

"Get out!" she ordered. "Don't you _dare_ come back again. I've spent too long trying to put this behind me, and I'm not going to put all that to ruin."

"So this really was just a waste of time, then, wasn't it?"

She gave a sharp nod, somehow smirking and frowning at the same time. "I told you, didn't I?"

He sighed, and got up, but had hardly gotten to the doorway before he paused, and spoke again. "Why did you come back, then?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You said that you were trying to forget all this, but then why come back to the family estate? I can't imagine that it doesn't hold any bad memories."

A pair of hanging figures out inside were what had greeted her, during the war with the Red Roses, and they both know that she would soon wish that they _had_ been her parents once she'd stepped inside and seen what had really happened.

"Family loyalty, I guess," is what she muttered. "Somebody had to come back, and carry on the name."

"But you haven't got any children," Zuko pointed out.

"I told her to stay away," she responded. "She's probably reading in her room right now. She's a reader, she is."

The Fire Lord flipped around, astonishment on his face. "You have a kid?"

The stone opened up, revealing itself to be a box, and she removed a small straw-filled doll from it before the lid sealed up again as if it had never separated. Toph looked at it for a long time before she answered. "She was on the streets. You'd like her," she said, never taking her eyes off the doll. "This is the only thing she had. She was clutching it for dear life when I found her, and that's when I decided to take her in. The Bei Fong line would get an heir, and she'd get a home. Win-win."

"What about yourself? You're not the Bei Fong line itself."

"She can… She can be given what I didn't have." The old woman shook her head slowly. "That's why I keep those idiots around, though. My girl's like a dream come true, some days. I don't… don't want to ever have to wonder if it's just all in my head."

"I'll leave you. I hope you can be happy, out of all of us," Zuko said, but she had stopped listening to him, and he left.

Stepping out the door and walking off the grounds of the estate, neither the Fire Lord nor his agents would ever walk toward it again for nearly a century. It may, or may not, have been better off for all involved if it had been a little bit closer to a full century before they returned, but that's another story entirely.

**xoooxoooxooox**

_Water Year 1180_

_Ba Sing Se, Province of Ba Sing Se_

"So what's that, then?" Nini asked her Earthbending teacher. She was about five-foot six, brown-haired and blue-eyed like everyone else from the South Pole (and the North Pole, too, or so she'd heard, and there was a brief moment when she'd wondered why there wasn't any diversity like in this place, but that's neither here nor there). A tall statue, nearly twice as tall as her, was standing about twenty feet away.

"The statue?" Master Sud asked.

"Yeah. The sign says that the real sign has been taken in for repairs, so…"

Two figures were shaking hands and smiling at each other, and by their dress it looked like they were the Fire Lord, and the Earth King, though Nini couldn't place either of them.

"Fire Lord Zuko— he couldn't convince the sculptors to keep his scars— and Earth King Kuei— who couldn't convince the sculptors to add Bosco."

"Bosco?"

"His bear."

Nini looked thoughtful. "I think I heard that the current Earth King had a bear, too. What kind is it, though?"

"Nobody knows. Just a bear."

"That's… weird."

"Yeah, but it's a bit of a tradition, you could say, though for the life of me I couldn't tell you where they're getting these 'bears.' But there's been a bear in the Royal Family for generations, long before even Earth King Kuei, and they've always named him Bosco."

"What does it mean?"

"I don't know. 'Brown,' or something."

"Oh. Not very original, is it… So what's the statue for?" Nini asked.

"Your last teachers have told you about the Time of Troubles, haven't they?"

"So have you," she pointed out.

"Just making sure, now. But you do need to keep in mind what it was like back in. Before Kuei unified the provinces, it was every city-state for itself, and there were several wars during that time, both between provinces of the Earth Kingdom and between this province or that, and the Fire Nation. Sometimes a province would start it, other times the Fire Nation would, but there's equal blame to be passed around, if you want to start flinging sparks."

"Mud, you mean."

"They say sparks over in the Fire Nation."

"Ah. Right. That makes sense. Back Home, it was always—"

"Language, Nini."

"— yellow snow," she quickly said, though she had in mind quite another way to describe it.

"That's better. But times back then were pretty chaotic."

"Some guy I was talking to said that the Fire Nation wiped out the Air Nomads," she interrupted.

Sud looked terribly, terribly shocked. "Now, where did you hear that?"

"I dunno. A couple of times. Somebody Back Home, too."

"First of all, stop talking about Back Home. I've told you time and time again that you need to forget about that. And about the Air Nomads… Yes and no. For a long time, the Air Nomads had been just… drifting apart. Fading away. And at one point, the Fire Nation was attacked by a group of Air Nomads, led by a monk named Afiko. We can't entirely excuse what Fire Lord Sozin did, because it's very true that he went overboard, but… He was starting to go mad, even at that age, and he attacked all the Air Nomads."

"That's a rather roundabout way of saying 'yes,' you know."

"A lot of Air Nomads still survived, though. That was just what finished the process of them 'fading away,' though. A few more decades, and they were all gone."

"Huh. The guy I talked to just the other day, though, he said that Sozin had wiped them out completely. And then he had gone to war against the whole world."

Sud laughed, though it sounded slightly strained, and slightly angry. Nini couldn't quite figure out why, but eventually decided that it was just because, as she'd learned on other occasions, he was a bit touchy about this subject. "Damned conspiracy theorists. Do you remember how I keep telling you to stop daydreaming, Nini? This is why. You fill your head with stupid theories like… like _that_," he spat, as if it were a piece of dung.

He shrugged, and frowned. "I can't really feel _too_ angry about it, though. The main problem is the history books."

"What do you mean?"

"Back when the Troubles were raging, pretty much everyone was writing their own history books. You couldn't let the opposite side have even a single hero, right? So there was lots of screwing around with that, and at various times this warlord or that governor would order the books burned, and… It's pretty hard to figure out everything that happened. Eventually, we just decided to piece everything together from all the books we could find. Yes, people didn't do a perfect job of it, but I think we did as good as we could."

"So what's the statue for?" Nini asked, finally remembering what this conversation had been started for.

"Fire Lord Zuko and Earth King Kuei. After the last Red Rose war, Zuko had this statue commissioned, to symbolize his dedicated to ensuring that there would never again be another conflict between the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom, even if that conflict came about because of Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom rebels and traitors." Sud smiled. "Don't trust everything somebody tells you about history, Nini. Those people didn't die just for some conspiracy theorist to decide that they'd been working for mass murderers and genocidal maniacs. Never forget that everybody involved had more than their share of blame."

"Do you think I could ever talk to somebody who lived back then?"

Sud seemed to think about it for a moment. "I suppose. There's not too many left, though. I could let you read your predecessor's accounts of the time, though."

"But I thought that he had been stuck in an iceberg for a hundred years."

"Which is, perhaps, why the Time of Troubles began. We weren't too used to not having the Avatar around to keep us in check, and so everybody started fighting everybody else as we all got short-tempered and too eager to fight. But he came back I time to experience some of it, you know."

"Oh… Hmm… So are you done with your business here?"

"Yes. Which means it's time for you to show me how well you've been practicing this last week."

"Aww…" Nini groaned. "Can't I get a break from all that?"

"I just gave you a break."

"That was a history lesson!" she complained.

"You're the Avatar. The sooner you become a fully-realized one, the sooner you can see your parents again." If the Fire Lord doesn't get all mushy and let her see them early, Sud thought. Discipline was necessary in the training of a Bender— especially one such as the Avatar— and letting them get distracted by family was no way to go about teaching them. The Avatar should be free of distractions during this period, he'd long ago decided.

And it did help, to tell the truth, for she promptly shut up, recalling scenes just a year or so old, of "Back Home." It surprised her how much she missed them even after so short a time.

"Can I at least get something to eat first?"

"After you demonstrate your first two forms."

There was another groan, but it was decidedly more good-natured than the first.

**xoooxoooxooox**

_Water Year 1196_

_The Spirit World_

"Careful, my lady," warned Hidama. The old, fiery wolf-spirit paused and sniffed the air. "He's nearby. If you'd like, I can probably take him in a fight. At least long enough for you to get the answers you need."

Nini smiled and shook her head. "That's quite alright, Hidama. Really, you don't need to come along with me. I'd feel just awful if you got your face stolen."

The wolf-spirit actually chuckled at the thought of that, and a few sparks flew out its mouth. "I'm certainly not in any danger of that, my lady," he said, and scampered up a tree in a manner not quite befitting any wolf-like creature Nini had seen. More like a bearded cat, or something. Definitely a feline of some sort, but there he was, clambering up and jumping from branch to branch.

It was quite amusing, for some reason.

"Please, stop it," she said. "You're making me laugh, and we certainly can't have that when we meet him."

Hidama instantly fell to the ground in a heap, and walked toward her, shifting his shape like a rolling shadow, until he seemed more manlike than anything of the form of a wolf. "Of course. My apologies," he said, with a grin that almost made her want to smack the spirit and remind him— _again_— that she was just as romantically involved with someone _else_ today as she had been _yesterday_. It was the only thing about him that irritated her— well, he did try and make her laugh when it was inappropriate to do so (like now) or goad her into yelling, but to tell the truth, she somewhat enjoyed that.

He'd like her to enjoy herself in some "other" ways, as well, but… At the very least, he recognized what the word "No" meant, and this was, in the end, just an attempt to get a reaction out of her.

She hoped, anyways.

"We're almost there, Nini my dear," he said, snapping her out of her thoughts.

At least she had finally gotten him to stop bringing up that one time that she and her husband had forgotten to lock the door and a few of his family members had found them, completely unaware that they had slipped away for a reason (actually, more like "unaware" with several sets of quotation marks, and a bit of a smile, rather than just plain old unaware, for her husband's siblings— and even his mother, to a _horrifying_ extent— were almost as fond of embarrassing the two of them as Hidama was). Well, in front of other people, anyways, which she was enough for the time being.

"For the fifth time today, I'm not 'your dear,' Hidama," she admonished him, but the fire of his coal-like eyes just sparked again, and the wolf-spirit smiled as he turned away.

Not that she could get rid of him, even for all the irritation (and amusement, she couldn't keep from thinking) which he brought her. Hidama was the one person, besides her husband, who she could trust completely. Yes, her in-laws could be placed in that category, too, she supposed, but when you got right down to it, it was her husband, and the old wolf-spirit who had pledged his immortal loyalty to her. Hidama had sinned against Agni, thousands of years ago, and he was hoping to make a penance by serving the Avatar. He regretted not helping Aang, but he hadn't planned on talking to him until the young Air Nomad found out what he really was, and once he'd gotten lost (if one can call getting frozen into an iceberg for a hundred years "lost), Hidama had gone into a… Hidama had said "seclusion," but Nini was willing to bet that it was just a good old-fashioned sulk-and-mope. Anyhow, by the time Hidama had decided to come out of it, he'd found out that a century-and-a-half had passed by, and he figured that he may as well just wait around for the next one to come up.

He failed to say if he hit on every female Avatar, or just her.

Probably just her.

Nini thought about it for a moment, and nodded to herself.

She had that sort of luck.

"Who's… coming near me?" said a low voice, coming from some distance beyond, and Hidama turned his head to face her, giving her a careful look.

"You sure?" he whispered, and Nini almost thought that he looked… _scared_. That in itself terrified her, but she had to press on.

Koh would be able to tell her about what had _really_ happened to the Air Nomads.


End file.
